April showers a day early. The raspy calls of a wild turkey leading five companions out of the woods and off down the road.
March 2022
3/30/2022
Five degrees below freezing and heavily overcast. A thin, lispy note—some finch, I guess, high in the black locusts. The dry hiss of sleet.
3/29/2022
Still bitter cold, but the wind has died. Clouds redden. A phoebe snags breakfast from the bark of a tree like a nuthatch.
3/28/2022
Bitter cold at sunrise. The usual singers are subdued, except for one dove. The occasional bang of heartwood split by ice.
3/27/2022
Winter’s back, with snow on the ground and more coming down. Juncos twitter happily. An ambulance goes wailing through the gap.
3/26/2022
Heavy clouds except where the sun glimmers through. Snowflakes. The robin’s bright warble.
3/25/2022
Brightness fated to be brief: already, gray-bottomed cumulus clouds are sailing in like galleons, dividing the blue between them.
3/24/2022
Under a uniformly gray sky the same titmouse has been singing the same monotonous notes, I realize, for the past 45 minutes.
3/23/2022
Ten-thirty and the promised rain finally begins to whisper in the dry leaves—a mountain’s worth of hush drowning out all distant engines.
3/22/2022
Weak sun through thickening clouds. A robin and his echo. The metallic taps of a titmouse opening a sunflower seed against a drainpipe.
3/21/2022
Deep blue sky; two degrees above freezing. As the sun climbs out of the trees, the morning chorus dies down until it’s only the Carolina wren.
3/20/2022
Cold and gloomy—classic March weather for the equinox. A Cooper’s hawk calls from the treetops, underneath which two squirrels chase, oblivious.
3/19/2022
Humid and cool. The sun keeps finding new holes in the clouds. The woodpeckers keep drumming.
3/18/2022
Sun climbing through the trees into a cloudless sky. A second male phoebe has joined the first, which means three times more phoebeing.